Inside Team Sky

by Walsh, David

  But beyond the image, there is reality.

  Virenque doped throughout his career, his team got caught and they came out with their hands up. All except their leader Virenque, who lied for more than two years and might never have told the truth if he hadn’t come up before Judge Daniel Delegove in the autumn of 2000.

  By then Virenque’s dishonesty had plummeted into pathos, so much so that you weren’t sure whether he deserved stoning or pitying. Presiding at the ‘Festina Trial’ in the autumn of 2000 Delegove, weary no doubt from having heard so much about cycling’s sordid business, looked at Virenque in the witness box and said, ‘Do you accept this reality, that you used doping products?’

  ‘It was a like a train going away from me,’ replied the still self-pitying Virenque, ‘and if I didn’t get on it, I would be left behind. It was not cheating. I wanted to remain in the family.’

  Virenque cheated to win, and his team celebrated with a lethal recreational drug concoction called Pot Belge. And still they fete him at the Tour. Officially. Festina is a name synonymous with that shameful 1998 Tour which began in Ireland but exploded when their soigneur and principal drug runner Willy Voet was arrested. And still they remain a Tour sponsor.

  For Rod Ellingworth, Team Sky’s master planner, the road book is the bible. So on the day he gets it, he riffles through the pages, checking the details that underpin his planning. He gets to page 46 with its photo of Virenque and it disgusts and confuses him. Ellingworth can be diplomatic, understated and restrained when talking about most things. Doping is different and in his eyes Virenque has stood for everything he despises about the sport. He stops at page 46, turns the page over to check there’s nothing too important on the other side, and tears Richard from the book and bins him.

  Returning to the Tour was straightforward for me once the sport had accepted the truth about Armstrong. There would be a new grammar, I hoped. Every new rider, every new effort, every iconic stage wouldn’t be compared with how things were when people believed in Lance.

  Every living winner of the Tour has been invited back to this centenary race. Every champion welcomed except the evil one. It makes me laugh a little. Yes, Armstrong is no longer a past winner but plenty of known dopers are (Riis, Ullrich, Contador, to name just three of the more recent) and this parade of champions is best enjoyed by those with the ability to suspend their disbelief.

  Still, I’m glad that he who once controlled everything can no longer get on the list of invites. His fall has given the sport a new chance but this monster’s head has been severed many times before and always it has reappeared.

  Sure enough, on the day the race begins, Lance gives an interview to the French quality daily Le Monde. He is determined not to go away.

  The interview is the usual greatest hits collection from the cave of his disgrace. The writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft summed up its content perfectly in the New Republic.

  Yet again he snivelled that, ‘I didn’t invent doping. I simply participated in a system. I am a human being.’ I suggest that readers could try a logical experiment, adapting that defence for persons accused of any other offence, from rape to racketeering to war crimes. He also said that the devastating report last fall from the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency ‘did not draw a true picture of cycling from the end of the 1980s to the present day. It succeeded perfectly in destroying one man’s life, but didn’t benefit cycling at all’ – his life, that is, rather than those ravaged by the scourge of doping.

  Still, I dream, we will make new memories and finally their weight will crush the past.

  Stage One brought the predicted carnage, but with a side order of comedy. First though, Chris Froome, one of the most accident-prone men ever to reach the higher echelons of this sport, had his first mishap. The Tour has two starts. It begins with a 3km ceremonial ride through the town. The riders stretch and preen, the populace cheers, the sun shines. The mood is set. These few kilometres aren’t for racing, they are a neutral zone.

  Alone of the peloton, Froome punctured in the neutral zone. A more superstitious man might have gone home but he, while the mechanic put on the new wheel, would have thought, ‘My good luck that it happened here.’

  The carnage came later. Chaos among the athletes and their bikes and parts of each were left on the scorching roads of Corsica in pile-ups and spills.

  These scenes of fallen riders and running medics went on as those gathered at the finish line were treated to a pantomime so bizarre and comical that it would have embarrassed a vicar running a village fete. As the peloton steamed towards the finish in Bastia, the Australian Orica-GreenEDGE team bus was going through the finish line when its roof got caught on the timing bridge above the line.

  There, under a big sign for Vittel mineral water, the bus got jammed, seemingly unable to move forward or back. When something unforeseen happens on the Tour, the space between the incident and a proper understanding of how it came about is filled with hearsay. These can be juicy and the excitement lasts until the truth comes out.

  So this is what came off the production line at the rumour mill: driver is cruising along the road to Bastia when he decides what he’d really like to do is watch the second test of the rugby union series between Australia and the British and Irish Lions. So he stops, orders a sandwich, watches the game, arrives late at the finish line after the gantry has been lowered and his bus gets stuck.

  The president of the race jury, Vicente Tortajada Villarroya from Spain, sees the pictures of the bus wedged into the timing bridge and decides to switch the finish to the 3km-to-go mark and communicates this to the team managers. This causes panic among the riders because they’re guessing the new finish is now located in the midst of narrow roads, sharp corners and short straights.

  What dissuaded Señor Tortajada Villarroya from stopping the race until the bus was freed and then re-starting it, no one knows. But, just in time, the bus extricates itself from the timing bridge and it’s decided to revert back to the original finish line. Problem being that some of the riders now knew about the change and others didn’t.

  Chaos.

  Pandemonium.

  And the crashes that might have taken place before the hastily chosen new finish line happen just before the original finish line. The stage is won by Marcel Kittel, the German sprinter with the Argos team. People presume this is typical of what happens in the first mass sprint when everyone is fresh and the result is not to be trusted. Kittel, it is assumed, shouldn’t beat Cavendish. The following three weeks would dismantle that assumption.

  Similarly, the assumption about the rugby-loving Aussie bus driver proved to be false. Garikoitz Atxa who drove the Orica team bus into Bastia that afternoon is in fact Spanish, and is not a rugby union fan.

  Things improved for the race from there on. A second stage streaked over the jagged mountains from Bastia towards Ajaccio and Team Sky, depleted and sapped by the first day’s crashes, had the pleasure of seeing Froome attack alone on one of the climbs.

  Nothing too serious, just a boyish checking out of his own powers and a desire to poach a little lead so that, when they began the descent, he would be able to pick his own lines and decide how fast he wanted to go. While not the worst descender in the peloton, neither is Froome the best. Instead, he uses his class going uphill to pick and choose in whose company he negotiates the descents.

  And if the stretching of legs sent a little flare over the heads of his rivals, that would have pleased him. No one with half a brain mistakes Froome’s politeness and softly spoken sentences for expressions of timidity. He has come to the Tour to win it and, such is his desire, the challenge for him is not the courage to attack but the discretion to know when not to.

  Jan Bakelants of RadioShack took the stage on a day when Geraint Thomas was Sky’s big concern. His horrific crash at the end of the previous day’s stage left him sore around the hip and pelvis but an initial X-ray didn’t show up any break. But soon after leaving Bastia, Thomas was in trouble and immediat
ely after the finish in Ajaccio, he was sent for another X-ray. Not many around the team expect him to last more than another day or two.

  Thomas is someone that the team’s brains trust – Brailsford, Kerrison and Ellingworth – believe could develop into a Tour de France contender. Without the injured Wiggins, the Welshman’s role in this race is greater because his intelligence and outgoing personality make him the obvious man to captain the team on the road.

  Brailsford fools around with Thomas in a way he doesn’t do with any other rider in the team, but only because Thomas understands that the mickey-taking is an expression of affection. To lose him in the first few days would be a blow.

  On Sunday, for television reasons, the Tour raced towards Calvi and then sidestepped the city to finish along a stunning coastal road a couple of miles away. The pictures justified the inconvenience for everybody else but the race was taken from the people of Calvi and the finish played out before a relatively small crowd.

  In Calvi one of the sport’s newest stars, the Slovakian Peter Sagan, was surprisingly beaten by Aussie, Simon Gerrans, and so two days after the marriage of their bus to the timing bridge, Orica-GreenEDGE were back in the news. Good news. Brailsford and Ellingworth seek out the Orica bosses and offer their congratulations. For all the guff about the English–Aussie rivalry, Team Sky feel an affinity with their Australian counterparts.

  The Tour had to move on quickly, all the riders had to board a fleet of coaches waiting to take them to Calvi Airport from where they would fly to Nice. Time was important because planes can only fly in and out of Calvi in daylight hours and pilots need special training before being allowed to do their job there.

  If the riders were rushing to get to the airport, staff members had more time to get to the harbour in Calvi for the six-hour ferry crossing to Nice. In the clamour of this migration from island to mainland not a lot was said about the final climb of the day, the second category Col de Marsolino, which came just before the drop down to the finish outside Calvi.

  Of Sky’s nine riders just two got over the top with the leaders, Froome and Richie Porte. Edvald Boasson Hagen almost made it but was dropped before the top, and then rejoined on the descent. So three finished in the main group of ninety riders and the other six didn’t make it. Their time losses ranged two to ten minutes.

  Something was wrong.

  Sky’s team is loaded with riders who can climb and support a leader where he will most need support: in the mountains. So here on the straightforward second category Col de Marsolino, which rises just 425m over 12km at an average gradient of 3.5 per cent, two thirds of Sky’s riders are scattered like pieces of paper on the mountain.

  A week before the Tour, I had been part of a two-man panel with Team GB’s Shane Sutton at a Sunday Times event in London. Pretty much everyone in the audience believed Froome was the likely winner of the race and I felt they needed to be reminded that it was the Tour de France they were talking about and there were reasons for wondering if Froome would do it.

  Primarily there were legitimate questions about the quality of the team, because it was obvious the team wasn’t as strong as the previous year. For different reasons, they wouldn’t have three of the strongest men from the 2012 team: Wiggins, Christian Knees and Michael Rogers. Wiggins was injured, Knees had ridden the Giro and wasn’t at his best, Rogers had joined the Saxo-Tinkoff team.

  It wasn’t just their absences that would be felt. To properly support Wiggins at the Giro earlier in the summer, Sky sent the Colombians Rigoberto Urán and Sergio Henao to the Italian race. After illness ended Wiggins’s race, Urán became the de facto team leader, won a mountain stage and went on to finish second. It was impressive.

  Both he and Henao would have made the Tour de France team stronger but, wearied by their efforts in Italy, they had to be left at home. At the Sunday Times evening I argued that the team would not be able to control the race because it just wasn’t strong enough. I’d expected Sutton to argue the opposite, but he didn’t. Without saying anything against the riders selected, he clearly thought it wasn’t a particularly strong team.

  I am sitting in a team car at the finish. Rushes and sand dunes outside. Soon we’ll be heading for the airport and the flight Brailsford has chartered for those members of staff not needed to take team vehicles on the ferry. I am in the backseat alone as the staff tend to the million-and-one duties they have at the end of a stage. Dave Brailsford arrives, slumps into the front seat and with a sigh he says, ‘You know what? We don’t have a team.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Today we weren’t there on that last climb. Just Froomey and Richie and Edvald. Pete Kennaugh was sick, G [Thomas] is in a bad way with his pelvis, and I don’t know what’s happening with the others. I didn’t see this happening on this stage but it’s not ideal. On the other hand, Froomey is very strong, Richie’s good and we’ve just got to get on and make the best of what we’ve got.’

  What is impressive is his refusal to be falsely optimistic. I know how Brailsford and his team plan for every contingency. And now this evening in Corsica, just three days into the Tour, Dave Brailsford, master of the cycling universe, is conceding that he has come to the Tour de France ‘without a team’.

  There should be histrionics. A note of despair. Instead the concession brings an insight into what makes Team Sky what it is. What has just happened is a fact. It is a problem. The problem will have to be solved. It is something to deal with.

  At the airport the mood among the staff is subdued. Men hand in and then pick up their bags without much talking. Psychologically these are a group of upbeat people. They feel a responsibility to give off a good vibe and, most of the time, it doesn’t involve an effort. Today is a jolting collision with reality that they can’t pretend not to have seen. Suppose the team is as weak as it seemed on that 145km spin from Ajaccio. Suppose there is no figuring a way out.

  That evening Kerrison, the head of performance, felt bad migraines coming. They can wait in the shadows for weeks and then come to life at the Tour. He deals with them in his way, unable to engage in small or big talk, just concentrating on bearing and banishing the pain. It is noticeable that Brailsford, who is closest to him, leaves him be.

  At a table in the airport, the Sky boss starts speaking with Carsten Jeppesen and Dario Cioni. The debrief was underway but they wear faces which hint at the gravity of the situation. What can we do with the guys who aren’t going well? Which of them just had a bad day and will get better? Let’s look at this rationally. We still have the best rider in the race.

  And on they go, calmly and analytically, knowing they have the team time trial the next day, Pyrenees later in the week and many miles to go before they sleep.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘All in the game, yo. All in the game.’

  Omar Little, The Wire

  Team Sky is a road movie with two leading men. Chris Froome and Bradley Wiggins don’t have the easy affability of Hope and Crosby. There is no straight man and no fall guy. Froome and Wiggins are ambitious, prickly and acutely aware that even though there are three Grand Tours every year, there is only one that young boys (not brought up in Italy or Spain) dream of.

  The chief cycling narrative of the spring of 2013 will be which man gets to contest the yellow jersey of the Tour de France. And whether or not his rival will defer to him and accept the role of superdomestique. Their breakthrough as cycling’s strangest double act came away from the Tour. They began forging their dynamic of odd couple chafing in the kiln of the 2011 Vuelta.

  Those were the strangest of days. Wiggins was already a star. Three Olympic golds and a fourth place in the Tour de France before being lured to Team Sky for more money than seemed sensible. Froome was half man, half rumour. An infuriating mix of mad potential, comical clumsiness, and undulating form lines. He was Kenyan. He was South African. He was British. He was either the next big thing or heading towards a quiet expiration of his Team Sky contract.

 
They had worked together before, but the relationship was defined in Spain. This was the proving ground for both men. Through the first nine stages of the race Froome had been the best Sherpa a man could wish for, toting the load for Wiggins in a team which had come to Spain without men like Edvald Boasson Hagen, Rigoberto Urán and Geraint Thomas. They looked miscast if they were expecting to finish on the podium but the defiance of Froome and Wiggins was heroic.

  Froome seemed to leave a huge part of his essence on the Spanish roads and mountains every day. On Stage Nine he hauled Wiggins to the Covatilla ski station in the mountains of Sistema Central while Vincenzo Nibali and Dan Martin set the pace.

  The 183km stage was designed to have the action loaded right here at the end day. The day would climax with a 10km 7.2 per cent gradient climb up Sierra de Béjar to La Covatilla. The road undulates as if created by a wave machine. Before the Covatilla scramble officially starts there are 8km of lesser gradient as a warm-up. Traditionally the heat here is merciless. Riders are made or broken on this hill.

  As the road turned for home and the crosswinds hit the riders, suddenly Froome accelerated, towing Wiggins in his slipstream. Having delivered Wiggins into the lead, Froome dropped back to the tail end of a group of six riders separated now from the field. Wiggins did the donkey work now through the last kilometre leading, leading, leading, until the final frenetic sprint which went to Dan Martin. Wiggins came in fourth though. Froome fifth. Just seconds off the lead.